-- This is it! ...... No, really, THIS IS IT!&nbsp,-- The story began at Sun Records almost 60 years ago. Now EVERY surviving song and EVERY surviving take that Jerry Lee Lewis recorded for Sun is here. All other sets are obsolete!&nbsp,-- Years of painstaking comparisons and tape vault research!&nbsp,-- 18 generously full CDs, 623 tracks ... more than 100 previously unheard versions!&nbsp,-- All mono versions! All stereo versions! All original Sun era overdubs!&nbsp,-- Two comprehensive hardbound books: one with the discography and commentary, and another of photos, many of them previously unpublished! &nbsp,

These 18 CDs place you in the studio as Jerry Lee Lewis records one epochal session after another for Sun Records between 1956 and 1963. In the history of recorded music, no one created such an incredible and indelible body of work in such a short time. Jerry Lee spanned the breadth of American music: gospel, R&amp,B, blues, country, pop, and of course rock ‘n‘ roll. Incredibly, he only recorded one LP during the course of his career at Sun. Another LP mixed some older and some newer recordings, and that was it before Sun was sold. The floodgates opened after the sale in 1969. There have been countless Jerry Lee Lewis anthologies since then—more than anyone could possibly tabulate—many of them drawing on the incredible wealth of unissued songs. But now you can get rid of them all. This is the guaranteed ultimate Jerry Lee Lewis on Sun listening experience. You can hear recordings created in the studio. Some were done in one take. If that’s all it needed, that’s all it took. Some were painstakingly recorded and re-recorded through days and sometimes weeks. It’s all here.&nbsp,

Every complete take, every incomplete take, every piece of chatter. It took two years of analysis to compare all the sources, but now it’s done. And it took years of research to find rare and published photos, and date them properly.
Producers: Andrew McRae &amp, Pierre Pennone
Valeriy 'Valerik' Orlov &amp, Willem Moerdijk Mastering: Christian Zwarg
Cover Illustration: Reinhard Kleist
Layout Mychael Gerstenberger
This is the sort of project that only Bear Family delivers. Truly the last word on truly the first name in rock ‘n‘ roll.
Original Sun Recordings licensed from Sun Entertainment, Inc.

Jerry Lee Lewis rocks.

Well, of course he does. "I come out feet first and been jumpin' ever since," he has told interviewers for many years. He has been rocking for as long as most of us can remember, and now his face is a personal geography that speaks of the toll that rock 'n' roll can exact.

Rock 'n' roll music and the rock 'n' roll lifestyle; Jerry Lee has done as much as anyone to define both. The miles, the wives, the hits, the pills. He has lived and sung without compromise. Surely no one has damned the torpedoes more often, and lived to tell. He saw his career rise meteorically, plummet meteorically, and rise again.

True talent cannot be denied. "Other people," says Jerry, "they practice and they practice. These fingers of mine, they got brains in 'em. You don't TELL them what to do - THEY do it." There are but four stylists in music, he'll tell you: Jimmie Rodgers, Al Jolson, Hank Williams, and himself. It was a foregone conclusion that Jerry Lee Lewis would be a charter inductee to the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame.

Jerry Lee Lewis & Sam Phillips

Fifty years ago as of this writing, Jerry Lee Lewis and his father, Elmo, drove up from Ferriday, Louisiana to see Mister Sam Phillips at Sun Records. Jerry Lee was sure that Phillips would understand him. He'd been turned away in Nashville, yet Phillips would see his potential. They were destined to come together: Lewis the former divinity student tortured by an unfathomable religion, and Phillips the former mortician's assistant who had persuaded unlettered country folk to give up their dead. Jerry Lee's indomitable mother, Mamie, had stopped him from listening to records because she didn't want him to sound like anyone else. Every day, Jerry Lee would pound the old Starck upright, slowly discovering something that was truly his.

A little boogie woogie, a little gospel, a little Hank Williams, and a little beerjoint blues. The Lewises lived in Ferriday, Louisiana, and Jerry Lee was born there on September 29, 1935. Six months after his cousin, Jimmy Swaggart. He was twenty-one when he arrived in Memphis. Telling the people at Sun Records that he played piano like Chet Atkins. Sam Phillips encouraged him to write songs, but the only tangible result was the B-side of his first record, End Of The Road.

Phillips copyrighted it without realizing that it had been loosely adapted from Ballard McDonald and James Handley's 1922 song At The End Of The Road. The only other song from Jerry Lee's pen on this collection is the monumentally egotistical Lewis Boogie. For Jerry, about Jerry, and by Jerry.

SUN Records

Very quickly, Sam Phillips saw that, unlike Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis would interpret rather than write. He would reveal himself to us through the words of others. Phillips also understood that he must let Lewis plunder the musical reliquary in his head before encouraging him to return to the one song out of ten or twenty that held promise.

That's how Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On came to be recorded. Jerry Lee had probably heard Roy Hall play it at an after-hours club in Nashville (Hall claimed to be the mysterious co-writer 'Sunny David' although that seems very unlikely).

In the opening four bars, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips made the piano into a percussion instrument. In feeding the signal back upon itself at just the right increment of tape delay. Phillips fattened the sound to the point that the record throbs with its own hypnotic life by the time J. M. Van Eaton's drums come in.

Jerry Lee's first hit

Van Eaton is exactly where he needs to be: it's textbook stuff, and Van Eaton wrote the textbook. In the two or so years that Jerry Lee had been fooling with Shakin', he had refashioned it in his image. Stripping away the opening couplet and inserting a half-spoken segment before storming back to close with a triumphant glissando. Wondrous and imperishable. It became Jerry Lee's second record and first hit. The record was pegging out half-way up the charts when Jerry made his first networked television appearance on 'The Steve Allen Show'. It was a landmark date in the history of rock 'n' roll; Sunday July 28, 1957.

He hammered the piano, eyes fixed above with messianic intensity. He glared at the camera with wild-eyed fury. "Whose barn? MAH barn!"Shakin' resumed its upward movement, eventually peaking at #3. The entertainment business realized that Jerry Lee was an up-and-coming act and he was offered a cameo movie appearance. It's a testament to his genius that he took a slight song manufactured for an equally slight movie, 'Jamboree,'and transformed it into one of the era's classics.

That song, of course, was Great Balls Of Fire. Carl Perkins and the movie's other stars had already turned it down, but it became Jerry Lee's defining moment. His biggest pop hit. Some claim to hear a rhythm guitar, but it's essentially Jerry Lee Lewis and drummer J. M. Van Eaton. If there's a third instrument, it's Sam Phillips' reverberation, adding depth and presence.

Great Balls Of Fire

Two New York-based R&B songwriters, Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer, had written Great Balls Of Fire and were offered a chance at the follow-up. Blackwell came up with Breathless while Hammer presented Milkshake Mademoiselle. Blackwell got the nod, and Milkshake Mademoiselle was left for wideeyed European researchers to find some fifteen years later. Blackwell's submission was yet another 'exclamation' song, and Sam Phillips engineered a promotional tie-in between television.

Host Dick Clark and Beechnut chewing gum in which kids could send in 50 cents and five Beechnut wrappers to receive a 'free' autographed copy of Breathless. Everyone at Sun's tiny operation, including lesser artists, were put to work autographing and mailing Jerry Lee's records. The television appearances jump-started the single, and it eventually rose to #7. Jerry Lee's last Top 20 hit was the title song for another quickie exploitation movie, 'High School Confidential'. Starring Mamie Van Doren (whose website has to be visited to be believed).

It was supposed to be an exposé of the high school drug problem. (yes there was a high school drug problem in 1958) The song was written by Ron Hargrave, a struggling MGM recording artist and protégé of Lou Costello (Hargrave can be seen in Abbott & Costello's last movie, 'Dance With Me Henry'). Try as he might, Hargrave couldn't quite work the title into the song, and had to surrender half of his writer's share to Jerry Lee. In the movie, Jerry performed the song on the back of a flatbed truck. It was released just as he left for a tour of England in May 1958.

Amazing box set

As an avid Jerry Lee Lewis admirer I regard this box set as a treasure beyond belief. The diligence, tenacity and resources of Bear Family Records is one-of-a-kind. If you are a fan of JLL go buy this box set. Not only to give yourself a treat but also to support Bear Family Records so they can make more of thses historic issues.

Überragend

Topped themselves

Examiner.com 5.2.16 The completist German record label Bear Family Records has topped themselves again with the most complete release to date of Jerry Lee Lewis' music recorded during his term at Sun Records."

From:Rocky LaneOn:5 Mar 2016

Error

Track 260 "Break Up (3.1)" states previous released on Sun Box 4-9/5. Should be Sun Box 4-9/15.

Eine große Freude

One-of-a-kind box

The Second Disc 4.1.16 "Spanning the period of 1956-1963, this one-of-a-kind box boasts 623(!!) tracks with more than 100 previously unheard tracks. Needless to say, this is a killer – make that killer – set for any rock-and-roll diehard."

From:BF PresseOn:12 Jan 2016

What the hell else do you need?

Now Dig This 1/16 "What the hell else do you need?"

From:BF PresseOn:22 Dec 2015

A fitting monument

Rolling Stone, 21.12.15 "This is everything: 18 CDs with 623 tracks covering the Ferriday fireball's every waking minute at the mike and ivories at Sun Records im Memphis, Tennessee. This set is a fitting monument with the perfect subtitle – to Lewis' pride, ego and achivement."

Press - ddicted to noise Australia
“What The Hell Else Do You Need?”
“Pretty fly for a white guy,” I summarized Jerry Lee Lewis most of my life—but always at the tail end of my summation of those Rock And Roll Grandaddies. Elvis was Elvis, I would say, and that needed no further explanation. Roy Orbison had the voice. Bo Diddley had the humor. Hank Williams had the desperation. Chuck Berry had the storytelling. And Little Richard, Lord save us, Little Richard sounded like a locomotive getting ready to run us over. And Jerry Lee had something. Just not quite that much something.
This is 18 CDs later, I surrender. This is everything Jerry Lee cut before his original Sun contract ran out in 1963. Listening to the man and company build a song, take by take, examining options and wincing at bloopers, the man egan to take wavery shape over my file cabinet.
I have, in fairness, never listened to 18 CDs from any of the others above. But I surfaced hearing a man with most of Little Richard’s ferocity, a man who sang surer than Williams, wider and deeper than Diddley, much looser than Berry, with an uncanny knack for song to beat Orbison. Elvis? Elvis remains Elvis. But Elvis sung starchy by 1963. Jerry Lee had of course ruined his career; if you’re reading this I bet you know how. But the frightening fullness of humanity, everything a man can be, remains.

Press Archive - Jerry Lee Lewis At Sun Records: The Collected Works - Rock Classic Italia
LAST MAN STANDING: This was the title of one of the most significant records by Ferriday's artist, Louisiana, released about ten years ago. He proclaimed in a brazen way like the Killer, this is the name that already, as a rage, they drowned him because of his reckless and overpowering character, he was the only survivor of that generation of pioneers who, in the 50s